


Malone

by Sheffsfic (Sheffield)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-14
Updated: 2011-04-14
Packaged: 2017-10-23 18:42:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheffield/pseuds/Sheffsfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For me to have a close relative with a... non-traditional relationship, shall we say? A relationship which, besides homosexuality, also included a dominance/submission dynamic which had a remarkable effect on my brother's well-being... Well. It did my brother good, and I was happy for them. But it wasn't a relationship I could allow to become a point of... vulnerability. For myself, my brother, or my... brother-in-law?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Malone

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Desdemona](https://archiveofourown.org/works/149654) by [BrighteyedJill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrighteyedJill/pseuds/BrighteyedJill). 



Malone was one of my most reliable operatives. I had noticed the name on some of the routine surveillance reports: the shorter ones. Succinct is excellent. After all, eight hours of surveillance requires eight hours of review, more if one is to extract all of the relevant data. Three viewpoints, at minimum, are required to give a rounded picture of the subject, which requires three operatives per shift, three shifts per day...

  


It's... labour intensive. And then the reviewers transcribe the salient points from the surveillance and an analyst is required to collate and review the transcripts. More often than not, by the time the final analysis reaches me it is so abridged, summarised, and tainted by opinion and analyst bias that it has scarcely any value at all except to indicate the portions of the original footage which might answer further viewing.

  


I have approximately 1400 people in various parts of the world under close surveillance for various reasons, and Malone's name kept coming up on the analyses. I reviewed several of the incidents reported and found the classification - as something I should see, or, more importantly, as something I need NOT see - to be unvarying in its accuracy. Remarkable.

  


I put Malone onto my brother and his partner fairly soon after the redoubtable Dr Watson entered Sherlock's orbit. It was at this point that I found out that Malone - as well as being a semi-retired Cold War warrior with a history of impeccable analytical skill going back to Krushchev- was actually a little old lady with blue hair and an extensive wardrobe of virtually identical cashmere twinsets in (at the latest count) forty-seven different colours. She always wore the same pearls (real, value in five figures, inherited from her late husband's family) and a rather striking platinum and amethyst ring (value scarcely into three figures but a gift from an agent she ran in East Berlin for a number of years and took as a lover four days before he was killed in an incident she had correctly identified as a likely outcome of an operation in a report that her superiors had ignored).

  


She was a remarkable woman.

  


Once I understood what, precisely, Dr Watson's relationship with my brother was becoming, I asked her to join the small specialist team that would, in future, take over the routine surveillance of their activities. For me to have a close relative with a... non-traditional relationship, shall we say? A relationship which, besides homosexuality, also included a dominance/submission dynamic which had remarkable effect on my brother's well-being... Well. It did my brother good, and I was happy for them. But it wasn't a relationship I could allow to become a point of... vulnerability. For myself, my brother, or my... brother-in-law?

  


The surveillance was necessary, but the people watching the surveillance footage needed to be carefully screened and the footage erased reliably. And of course it was necessary to stay one step ahead both of my brother's frequent and, might I say, obsessive attempts to evade surveillance but also one step ahead of Mr Moriarty's attempts to introduce similar surveillance of his own into their little menage. All in all a nice knotty problem, to which the remarkable Mrs Malone contributed with satisfying efficiency.

  


So when Mrs Malone red-flagged one of her reports I paid her the compliment of taking her seriously and viewing the footage for myself.

  


My brother was injured, which was unacceptable. Of course, his self-imposed profession meant that he injured himself on a regular basis but this was different. I reviewed the occasion, and observed that the good doctor was unaware of the injury. In fact Sherlock had clearly lied to him and caused the bulk of the damage himself. Carelessness. But not Dr Watson's.

  


I wondered if it was necessary for me to review the footage of the action taken by Dr Watson as a result.

  


Instead, I asked Mrs Malone to join me for afternoon tea. Her account of the evening in question was everything I had come to expect from her. After all, one can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people capable of relaying detailed information about one's brother's punishment at the hands of his - "dom," I believe, is the preferred term - with neither enjoyment nor prurience.

  


Boredom, though. I admired the good Doctor's wit. I wished I had hit upon it as a training methodology myself, when Sherlock was seven and I seventeen, perhaps.

  


"And the reward for compliance was rather inventive: a handkerchief, to be used as a prop."

  


Malone didn't elaborate, which was tactful of her. Instead she poured me a second cup of Earl Grey and glanced towards her handbag, tucked neatly under her chair.

  


Quite right. She was ready for another promotion, which would take her pay up by approximately seven percent, enabling her to pay the expensive school fees for her third grandchild in addition to the boy at Harrow and the girl at the Dragon School.

  


"I would like you to take over my brother's surveillance detail for the future, Mrs Malone," I said politely. Although strictly speaking a Civil Service post, and more particularly a promotion to that level, ought to be offered on open competition, where else would one find this particular set of skills?

  


"Thank you, Sir," she said demurely. 

  


I had expected her to be efficient. I had found her to be unshockable. I was really rather pleased with my own cleverness in finding someone so perfect to whom I could entrust Sherlock’s safety and wellbeing. Until she happened to put down her teacup and look up at me with what I believe is called an "old-fashioned look." I realised there was nothing clever about it at all; it was simply inevitable. She really did remind me of Mummy.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to innie_darling for sterling beta work on the remix, and of course to Brighteyed Jill for the original work.


End file.
